Sizzling Billy Ocean Has `Caribbean Queen` To Thank For Crowning

U.s. Success

February 17, 1985|By Lynn Van Matre, Pop music critic.

To most of the million-plus people who`ve bought Billy Ocean`s current album, ``Suddenly,`` the title tells the story of the Trinidad-born British singer`s arrival on the pop scene last summer. One minute, it seemed, Ocean was an unknown quantity; the next he was one of the hottest new singers around, thanks to the seductive rhythms of ``Caribbean Queen.``

``Caribbean Queen,`` along with Ocean`s follow-up hit, ``Lover Boy,`` has helped make ``Suddenly`` one of the best-selling albums of the moment--and brought Ocean two Grammy Award nominations, one for the best male rhythm & blues performance and another as composer of the best rhythm & blues song.

(To those who would suggest the tune borrowed heavily from Michael Jackson`s ``Billie Jean,`` Ocean, a Jackson fan, replies, ``Nothing is 100 percent original.``) ``Caribbean Queen`` also had the distinction of reaching the No. 1 spot on the pop, dance and black music charts, the first song by a British artist to do so.

Not bad for a guy who most people had never heard of before and who is only now touring the U. S. for the first time.

``Actually,`` admits the singer, who kicked off a three-month American tour last month with an appearance on ``Saturday Night Live`` and who played Park West last week, ``this is is my first tour of anywhere.``

But Ocean, it turns out, is no music business novice. He`s also no stranger to false starts. At 34, he has four other albums and a couple of mid-`70s British hits to his credit. A couple of years back, his song

``Nights`` was a U. S. R & B hit, but failed to gather the momentum to launch Ocean as a pop success. Ocean admits that there were times in the last 10 years when he ``didn`t know where the next penny was coming from,`` but says he never got too discouraged.

``I believe in nothing before its time,`` explains the singer, who speaks in an accent that reflects both his West Indies origins and his years in London, where he has lived since age 8. ``I`ve got a strong religious faith

--some people think that believing in God is old-fashioned and not hip, but not me--and I believe that when it`s the right time for something to happen, it`s going to happen. And when it does, nobody can take it away from you.

``I think my success now is a combination of a lot of things,`` Ocean says. ``Working with producer Keith Diamond (who cowrote ``Caribbean Queen``) has a lot to do with it. And then, you can have good songs, a good producer, you can come up with the greatest record possible, but if you don`t come up with that right coordination between yourself and your record company and your management company and the licensees (that distribute the album) around the world, things aren`t going to happen. My name is the one on the record, but there are a lot of other people who are probably just as responsible for this hit as I am.``

A name change probably had something to do with Ocean`s success, too. Had the title of a song called ``European Queen`` not been changed to ``Caribbean Queen,`` Ocean probably wouldn`t be riding a wave of popularity today.

``The song was released in Europe as `European Queen` and nobody was interested in it,`` Ocean says. ``When we changed the name to `Caribbean Queen` and released it in the U. S., it took off and started snowballing and they started playing it in Europe. I guess it had more appeal as `Caribbean Queen` because Europe conjures up a vision of rain and snow and cold, but Caribbean sounds like sunshine and blue skies. It`s much more exotic.``

Ocean`s interest in music began while living in Trinidad, where a friend of his mother`s gave the 3-year-old Billy a little ukulele one Christmas. His father played calypso guitar as a hobby, but it was a blind man who taught Ocean to play a couple of chords on the ukulele.

``After that, I found myself wanting to do music and really not being interested in much else,`` says the singer, who considers himself fortunate that when his family decided to leave Trinidad they moved to England instead of America.

``If we had moved to America, I probably would have grown up hearing nothing but R & B music,`` Ocean says. ``Not that there`s anything wrong with R & B, but I wouldn`t have had the exposure to different kinds of music that I got in London. It`s such a cosmopolitan place, you can hear all kinds of different music just walking down the street.

``One of the things I found lacking, though, was music you could dance to,`` he says. ``Take my word for it, there really wasn`t much of it around when I was growing up; the only music that I found to dance to was by American performers like Wilson Pickett and James Brown. And I took a particular liking to Otis Redding, because his music combined dance music with the European style of songwriting that I had become accustomed to relating to, with nice lyrics and melodies and the song treated as a separate entity from what`s going on in the backing track.